It’s not our fault, and we can prove it to the 10th decimal place

Post capitalism, cocoa edition

I went to a dinner this week at the annual Chocoa conference in Amsterdam. It was seven courses, accompanied by 5 rounds of wine, all cooked up by a chef flown in two weeks ago from the US. I kinda thought it was going to be the bog standard rubber chicken dinner followed by a lot of market chit chat. Nope. It was eat, drink and be merry at the top of the cocoa pile while we work out ways to help small farmers, because, of course “farmers are at the center of our industry”. I don’t know who thought this might be a good idea, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t consider the optics while they worked their way through several rounds of test dinners.

We had just spent the last two days sitting through a sustainability conference where two good friends of mine laid out the mess on the ground in the Ivory Coast, the world’s largest producer, in clear and unambiguous tones to all of the participants. Except, of course, if you were the tone deaf dinner organizer.

Cocoa swollen shoot virus is present at even more sites than were originally thought, thanks to several rounds of tree DNA testing, that can detect it even if the tree is not showing symptoms. Short story: it’s everywhere. And the trees are beat up after 30 years of declining maintenance. The sky high cocoa market should be good news for farmers, but both the cocoa organizations in charge of hedging in the Ivory Coast and Ghana had hedged it at much lower prices. Compounding the problem, they oversold and had to roll these hedges, which cost even more money.

We’ve had this incredible consolidation in two countries which export more than 70 percent of the world’s cocoa. In a sector that’s been laser focused on child labor and deforestation, it’s taken its eye off the actual crop itself. Now the bill for decades of neglect is coming due.

Farmers are switching to other crops, the Ivory Coast has gone from 235,000 tonnes of rubber to over 1.6 million tonnes in less than 10 years. And for farmers, rubber has no marketing body taking their vig. The country is now the world’s third largest producer of cashew. There’s more cattle and palm oil. As someone said to me in Amsterdam, “the market works.”

But what was the focus this week? The new, but delayed EU laws on European Union Deforestation Regulation or EUDR. The floor of the chocolate fair was filled with with consultants spruiking their latest satellite tracking software. Why? Because that’s where the money is. They can map farms down to 10m x 10m so chocolate makers can sleep at night knowing they aren’t contributing to deforestation. But you know what? It’s happening all around them. These pictures are from a colleague who has been going to the Ivory Coast for decades.

No, none of it came from cocoa farms.

So all these great maps will show you where it’s not happening. All that money on satellites and software and consultants is not going to stop one tree being chopped down. It will just prove it’s not the chocolate industry’s fault so they can go on doing what they’ve been doing for decades. Which is nothing.

I’ve been part of the cocoa industry since 2004, so I’m not lily white and innocent myself. But what I am doing is building a sustainable agroforestry model in Belize based on cocoa and vanilla using my own money. So yes, my skin is well and truly in the game.

What’s a chocolate buyer to do? Firstly, stop with the supermarket chocolate. It’s not a meal replacer. Focus on a couple of smaller chocolate brands, do your own research. Ask the difficult questions. And find out who’s skin is truly in the game. They are the only ones that are going to change this chocolate colored mess.